Young Shelley immersed himself in Gothic fiction, especially in 1809–11. The immediate results were his Gothic romances, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, and his earliest long verse narrative, The Wandering Jew. As derivative as these were, they show the wide range of his Gothic reading and his initial ways of striving to make the Gothic his own. Despite his regretting these ‘extravagances’, it turns out he never left the Gothic behind. Instead, he enriched the suggestiveness of Gothic symbol-making across his career – from Alastor and his contributions to Mary’s Frankenstein to The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and The Triumph of Life – partly by building on the Gothic’s expansion from the 1760s on but also by exploiting the symbolic fundamentals of ‘Gothic Story’ as Horace Walpole defined them in The Castle of Otranto. By reworking Walpole’s interplay between the assumptions of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ romance, Shelley repeatedly used the Gothic to intimate the tug-of-war between retrogressive and progressive ideologies that simmered in his own thought and in Western culture.

This chapter discusses Shelley’s complex orientation towards Romantic-period drama and theatre culture. For Shelley, drama provided a key opportunity for generic experimentation that is continuous with his lyrical innovations. These innovations, however, go beyond producing new kinds of Romantic ‘closet dramas’, which were intended for a smaller, more bourgeois reading public. To argue this claim, the chapter attends to how Shelley’s writings on ancient Greek dramaturgical principles resonated with his interest in Romantic-period popular theatre. As shown in his dramatic poetic theory, Shelley attempted to realise his ideal intersection of aesthetics, historical progress, and contemporary social change in works sometimes intended for popular consumption. As demonstrated by his hopes to stage certain plays, Shelley’s dramatic efforts indicate that embodiment and mixed media forms were essential to his broader poetics.

Percy Shelley was a poet of fiery politics who recognised the power of language to surprise and even shock. Across three centuries and around the globe, politicians and activists have turned to Shelley’s poetry for help furthering their political causes. With specific attention to poems like ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, ‘Song to the Men of England’, ‘England in 1819’, and ‘Ode to the West Wind’, as well as to critical prose pieces like ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ and ‘A Defence of Poetry’, this chapter situates Shelley’s views on revolution and reform in their historical context and takes some tentative steps towards exploring why Shelley’s poems have so frequently been put to political purpose.

This essay examines the literary interchange between Percy Shelley and John Keats through a comparative reading of their poems, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ and ‘To Autumn’, both of which were written in explicit (Shelley) or implicit (Keats) response to the Peterloo Massacre. Drawing special attention to the formal and stylistic differences between these two poets, I argue that each demonstrates a distinctive attitude towards argument. More particularly, I suggest that Keats and Shelley are uniquely interested in the question of whether or not a poem can make a political claim and, more broadly, in the relationship between politics and aesthetics.

Shelley’s poetry was shaped not only by his formal education and privileged position as a member of the Whig-supporting landed gentry class but also by the architecture of his family home and the farming environment of rural Sussex. The paradoxes of his early experiences (unconventional family members coexisting with the conventional moral training of a young patrician; his father’s mildly progressive politics combining with corrupt practices; security at home intercut with violent bullying at school) formed his early conceptions of tyranny and his mission to oppose it. Ossified and limited school and university curricula that nevertheless provided opportunities to pursue areas of knowledge lying outside it together with encouragement to write and freedom to read anything he wanted – these experiences co-mingled to make him at once scholar, gentleman, revolutionary, and philosopher.

This chapter reopens the case of Shelley’s ‘Defence’, both his famous manifesto and the question of defending (or critiquing) Shelley. The essay addresses Shelley’s vision of the poet; its salience for twenty-first-century readers, critics, and poets; the relation of lyric to law (marked in the famous phrase ‘unacknowledged legislators’); and the status of ‘Man’ as ‘an instrument’ (Shelley’s ‘Aeolianism’). Shelley emerges via philosopher Giorgio Agamben as a vector of ‘the contemporary’. Poet Sean Bonney offers one critique of Shelleyan poetics, theorist Barbara Johnson another. The essay turns to poet and essayist Anne Boyer to explore Shelleyan negation and reckonings with ‘the world’, and turns next to poets Ariana Reines and Christopher Nealon as offering latter-day Shelleyan Aeolianisms – proposing the poet as a medium of imagination and of historical processes. The essay concludes with a poem by the author (McLane), ‘Mz N Triumph of Life’.

This chapter examines Shelley’s engagement with early-nineteenth-century science. It explores Shelley’s interest in chemistry at Oxford, his interest in contemporary developments in science (such as galvanism), and his reading of canonical and contemporary writers in science. Humphry Davy, the foremost man of science in Britain in the early nineteenth century, emerges as an important contemporary influence on Shelley; this chapter discusses the influence of Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) and Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1813) on Shelley’s writing, specifically in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 6, Queen Mab (1813), and ‘The Cloud’ (1820).

While Shelley produced many of his most important works in self-imposed exile from Great Britain, various locales in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales played an important role in his personal and poetic development. Attending to Shelley’s experiences across Great Britain and Ireland, and to local sociopolitical dynamics in the places where he lived and worked, this chapter traces some formative influences upon his later poems and essays. It finds that Shelley’s political and aesthetic maturation owed much to his geographical and institutional surroundings and illuminates how these surroundings contributed to his alienation, radicalisation, and visionary zeal.

The term lyric conjures many different things: musical language, emotional intensity, the qualities of ritual or prayer, introspection, and interiority. It has also come to designate a wide variety of spoken, sung, and printed poetic forms. This chapter explores Shelley’s relations to these ideas and forms through his reading and his writing. It also places Shelley’s writing in the context of modern and contemporary lyric theory, which investigates and expands the meaning of the term lyric and puts useful pressure on assumptions we might have about poetic voice, subjects, or speakers. In bringing these various contexts together, I suggest that none of them can wholly determine Shelleyan lyric, which is by turns formally constrained and politically engaged, intimate and impersonal.

Chapter 3 shows how British writers (including Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, and Percy Shelley) grappled with the question of who owned classical Greek culture in the years following the Napoleonic Wars. With Greece long under rule by the Ottoman Empire, Britain wrote itself as ancient Greece’s culture heir. Inheritance was the temporal form that facilitated this transfer, not only of the succession of culture but also of material, as I show in British arguments surrounding Lord Elgin’s acquisition of marble relics from the Parthenon. I end by considering Greek antiquities in the British Museum and the attendant conflicts about universal cultural heritage they continue to engender.

What might Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry teach us about the current crisis of the humanities? This crisis is perpetual at least since Plato banished poets from his Republic. But in our current climate of anti-intellectualism, the crisis feels especially urgent. Or is it? Shelley’s answer was the autonomy of imagination, a creative spirit that sustained liberal notions of what Northrop Frye called an “educated imagination,” the hallmark of civil society. Yet Shelley feared this future might never arrive. Instead of a second half of the Defence, he wrote an elegy on the death of Keats. So, what is our future in a world where the autonomy of imagination has morphed into fake news and alternative facts? Add to this the existential crises of a pandemic and climate change and poetry must not only reimagine the world but justify its capacity to do so. This latter necessity defines a neoliberal academy in which the humanities, precisely because historically they have questioned being instrumentalized, need to make themselves ever more relevant or perish altogether. This chapter asks what hope might be created from contemplating that possible wreck, and thus what it means to educate our imaginations in perilous times.

While Percy Shelley anticipates and speaks to many important subjects of “our times,” he also developed a poetry and methodology for connecting and collaborating with peoples in other places and epochs. In this account, the editors reconsider Shelley’s often binaristic historical reception as both politically radical and childishly idealist, instead offering a version of the poet who continuously rethinks categories and relations among people and their times.

The sixth and final chapter considers horror writing’s appropriation of flesh-caricature from writing descriptive of the human body, dismantling character’s place in formal realism. I explore the grotesquing of the disproportioned body in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and her short story ’Transformation’, and in Walter Scott’s dwarf characters, where the aesthetic type of the ’gigantic dwarf’ gives rise to a mode of writing I call ’horrid realism’. The second part of the chapter grounds horrid realism in eighteenth-century texts that imagine the literalisation of caricatúra, such as Thomas Browne’s depiction of the Hippocratic face, and the effects of swaddling bands and foundation garments as pictured by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Buchan, William Cadogan, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and J. P. Malcolm.

This chapter addresses five authors who respond to Romantic hopes in indefinite futures: John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Friedrich Nietzsche. In Mill’s late writing on religion, hope in eternal life constitutes a link to Romantic poetry, a motive for taking life seriously, and a wan empirical possibility. In Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil, blind hope, or our uncertainty about other people and any future we might share with them, may be necessary for love and engagement in this life – or it may be a grievous, fatal error. Along with Dickinson, Eliot supplies a bridge to the Modernists’ largely ironic representation of hope, more or less stripped of its possible virtue. The art of Dostoevsky is also oriented toward emerging Modernism, even as he exposes the ills of modernity, ultimately affirming something akin to Christian hope. Nietzsche sketches a new hope that might rise on the grave of Christianity. Despite his well-known adage on Pandora’s jar – the hope it contains is “the worst of evils” – Nietzsche more often prophesies, in his later writings, the “highest hope” of becoming who one is.

There are numerous records of Byron and Shelley’s discussions, including, perhaps above all, Shelley’s brilliant conversation poem, Julian and Maddalo, in which Shelley’s ‘Byron’ is Count Maddalo and Shelley’s ‘Shelley’ is Julian. Like the conversation of Julian and Maddalo, the conversation with which I want to begin this consideration of the overlapping poetries and poetics of Byron and Shelley may or may not have happened quite as reported. ‘Byron and Shelley on the Character of Hamlet’ appeared in the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal eight years after Shelley’s death and six after Byron’s.